
Guake also comes with a selection of neat color schemes, giving you a few stylish options. Just tap to bring it down, or to make it full-screen, and you’re away. There’s no need to keep a window open, hunt around for the Terminal icon when you need to type something useful, or check your performance in htop. This behavior is highly useful, particularly when you’re working with a small screen or need a terminal to quickly scroll through a configuration file or read a man file. Instead, it apes the behavior of Quake’s console, un-hiding itself and dropping down from the top of the screen when you hit a hotkey. Guake doesn’t offer you quad or mega-health power-ups, red armor, or even come branded with Quake’s classic brown-on-brown color scheme, thankfully.

This Terminal emulator, crafted specifically for Gnome, takes inspiration from the classic shooter Quake, as its name suggests. Meanwhile, Android fans might find the best Android emulators useful. Let’s refresh your view of those plain old white-on-black characters, as we pick out our top Linux Terminal emulators.Īt Techradar we also feature the most popular Raspberry Pi distros, the best Linux distros for privacy fiends and security buffs, the most popular Linux gaming distros and the most popular lightweight Linux distros.

Of course, your Linux distro will have a ‘Terminal’ application already such as xterm, Gnome Shell or Konsole – but this probably isn’t as good as your emulator could be.

And while you’ll likely never be in a position where you’re not able to drop to a straight full-screen shell, having a quick window to the command line on your desktop is always handy. The key, if you’re a terminal-slinging Linux badass, is to make sure you type those commands with as much style and panache as possible. Exactly what to type is beyond the scope of this article – check out the guide here to get yourself started on that front. If you need something done quickly and efficiently, it’s likely that the best way to do it is with some complex keyboard wrangling.
